The Value of a Resend Campaign, By the Numbers

The phrase “one weird trick” usually sets off alarm bells, but what if I told you there was one weird trick that could increase your open rates by 8.7%? It’s true, and I have the data to prove it. All you have to do is resend your campaign to subscribers who didn’t open the first time.

Open rates on resend campaigns don’t perform as well as they do on the first send, but they’re not terrible, either. We looked at 1,300 instances where the user sent a campaign and then re-sent it shortly after. The average open rate on the original campaign was 26.7%. That’s not bad, but these users knew they could do better, so they re-sent the campaign and got enough new opens to increase the original open rate by 8.7 points. That’s a significant-enough chunk of your list seeing a promotion that could make or break your quarter.

Of course, opens aren’t the only thing that matters. Clicks are important too, and you should always be wary of list attrition from unsubscribes and abuse complaints. I should also note that abuse complaints can severely impact your deliverability, and you don’t want to gamble with your ability to reach the inbox. We decided to explore what factors make resend campaigns more or less successful.

Our methodology

The way we measured the impact of the resends is important, so let me detail that process. We decided to measure based on the additional impact the resend campaign had on total opens, clicks, unsubs, and abuse complaints from the original send.

In other words, we didn’t look at the open rate of the resend campaign; we looked at the list from the original campaign and treated the opens from the resend campaign as if they added to the opens from the original campaign.

We liked this measurement because it shows the real impact of the resend campaign on what matters: the number of subscribers who see your email.

Change the subject line?Verdict: Don’t do it.

These charts show the additional opens, clicks, unsubs, and abuse complaints our users saw after sending resend campaigns. In this case, we divided resends into two buckets: those who kept the same subject line and those who changed it.

People who used a different subject line for their resend campaign saw fewer opens and more abuse complaints than people who kept the same subject line. The difference in click rates and unsubscribe rates was minimal, so this one is a slam dunk. It’s better to keep the subject line you used the first time.

Change the visible From name? Verdict: Don’t do it.

The visible From name is the name most subscribers will see when your email hits their inbox. The data suggests that changing the visible From name does increase opens, but it decreases clicks while massively increasing unsubscribes and abuse complaints. Our advice is to keep your visible From name the same. You may get more subscribers to open the email, but you probably won’t get more subscribers to engage with the email in a positive way.

The whys behind the numbers

Resending a campaign can be a powerful way to get more opens and clicks on key campaigns, but it comes with risks. According to the data, it looks like you can minimize the risks by keeping your subject line and visible From name the same. Why? I can only speculate, but I imagine it boils down to trust. If you’re honest and straightforward about who you are and why you’re sending an email, most subscribers are happy to keep engaging with you. After all, that’s why they signed up, so there’s no need to get tricky.

In a future post, we’ll explore more variables on resend campaigns like the optimal number of days to wait before resending and whether changing the time of day between the original campaign and the resend gets more opens.

Was message threading taken into account? Gmail’s message threading makes exact resends look like duplicates instead of little reminders of a missed message, which is why I assumed subject lines were changed (even slightly) for the resend. Curious if there was a breakdown by email services that thread vs. don’t thread. And if so, just validation that it still didn’t matter. :)

Hey Lisa, good question! For this research project, I wanted to provide a broad look at resend campaigns, so I didn’t take Gmail’s message threading into account. That kind of granular analysis is definitely interesting though, so thanks for surfacing this issue! Offhand, I wouldn’t expect a big impact. Message threading in Gmail drags the original email to the top of the inbox along with the new email, so the real world impact hopefully shouldn’t change.

Glad to hear your take on this, Matthew. It’d be interesting to see how much of an impact threading has (gmail and others). Not sure how we could isolate for this though.

I bring this up because a previous employer of mine saw substantial engagement increases when sending a (second) follow up email. I can’t remember the specific numbers, but this second email (which would get threaded in gmail) had engagements almost as high as the first email. The CTA was to respond to schedule a call with an advisor (it was in the education space).

Hey Carl, that’s interesting! I wonder if that was due to threading or the tendency for students to be extreme procrastinators. I wasn’t the only one, right? :)

Either way, this definitely seems like an area for future research. From what I saw in our first round of research, the second email almost always underperformed in opens and clicks and outperformed in unsubscribes and abuse complaints when compared to the original send. Identifying cases that run counter to that trend is definitely worth looking in to.

I actually did a resend for a recent campaign a couple of days afterwards and noticed the CTR for the CTA was much higher as stated here. I believe the objective of the campaign plays a key role as well while weighing other metrics (Just saying)

Hi Jenn, I definitely noticed that resend campaigns saw lower open and click rates as compared to the original sends. The resends also saw higher unsubscribe and abuse rates as well. The abuse rate is the real factor to watch. If your original campaign had an abuse rate that even approached 1%, I would be very concerned that a resend campaign could impact my deliverability. However, this isn’t an issue for most users.

Even if the resend campaign doesn’t perform as well as the original, it’s still adding to the total number of subscribers who engaged with that particular piece of content. That can be huge! Of course, like any marketing practice, it should be exercised thoughtfully and strategically.

What about the impact of those unsubscribes though? If you have a 1.6% unsubscribe rate here, which is what I’m reading from the charts, then you’ve lost the ability to market to that person forever. Getting an additional 8% opens for a 1.6% unsubscribe rate seems like a poor tradeoff to me…

Hi Phil, that’s a great point! You definitely want to be aware of list attrition. In this case, unsubscribe rates are calculated as a percent of opens for each campaign and resend. If they were calculated as a percentage of delivered emails (sent – bounced), the additional unsubs you could except to see from a resend would increase your original unsub rate by an average of 0.25% if you did not change your From address and by 0.36% if you did. I hope that clears things up!

There will be subscribers who either didn’t see or didn’t open the email on the first send but did see and/or open the email on the second send. A lot of the engagement on the resend campaign will be opens and clicks, but we should also expect to see a few more unsubscribes and abuse complaints.

Resending without changing anything looks exactly like the original. If the original was not opened, then it would just look like it was higher up in the list. With Google multithreading on gmail, the new post and the original post would be part off the same conversation, as long as gmail did not screen it out on the second send.